The Politics of Otherness: Arianism and Orthodoxy in the Ostrogothic Kingdom and the Late Antique Mediterranean World (MA thesis, University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands)

In the study of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, there has been a lot of writing about the Germanic tribes and kingdoms in the Roman Empire, especially about the creation of their ethnic identities, but the religious aspect of the process has been neglected.
In an age when ‘ethnicity’ is understood for Late Antiquity as contextually everchanging, one cannot walk on confortable paths anylonger. What was seen as particularly antagonistic, as, for instance, the diferrent religious ‘orthodoxies’, (more or less heretical one to the other) has been treated in the past accordingly. The old mentality cannot offer nowadays but superseded analysis. It is time to discuss the religious issues, – at least from a social and cultural viewpoint, in terms of interaction and continuity, instead of remaining to terms of religious opposition.